The Swimmer Speaks

ကုိရင္ႀကက္ေတာအမွန္ေၿပာၿပီ... 
The Swimmer Speaks

 

ေမာင္ရင္ငေတႀကက္ေတာ...ဘယ္သေဘာနဲ.မ်ားေရကူးခဲ.ပါလိမ္.   .....

ကမ ၻာေက်ာ္ေရကူးသမား၊ၿဂဳိလ္ေမႊတဲ.စေနသားကုိရင္ႀကက္ေတာတစ္ေယာက္သူ.မိခင္နုိ္င္ငံၿပန္ေရာက္
လုိ.သူ.ဇနီး၊သားသမီးေတြနဲ.အတူၿပန္လည္ေတြ.ဆံုနုိင္ၿပီမုိ.သာမာန္လူတစ္ေယာက္အဖုိ.ေတာ.၀မ္းသာ
စရာေပါ.  ....

အခုေတာ.ဘယ္သူ.ကုိမွေႀကာက္စရာမလုိေတာ.ပဲသူ.ရဲ.နာမည္ေက်ာ္ကမ ၻာေက်ာ္ေရကူးအေတြ.အႀကဳံ
ကုိ နယူး၀ိစ္မဂၢဇင္းကုိေၿပာၿပခဲ.ပါတယ္...

ေႀသာ္...သူကအရင္တံုးကဘတ္စ္ကားလည္းေမာင္းခဲ.ေသးတာပဲ...ဗီယက္နမ္စစ္ၿပန္လဲၿဖစ္ခဲ.ေသးေတာ.
အေတြ.အႀကံဳကေတာ.ေတာ္ေတာ္စံုေနၿပီေပါ.  ...

”ေအေက ၄၇  ကုိင္ထားတဲ.လက္နက္ကုိင္အေစာင္.ကကြ်န္ေတာ္.ကုိလက္ဆဲြႏွဳတ္ဆက္ၿပီးၿခံ၀င္းထဲကုိ
ေပး၀င္ပါတယ္...သူတုိ.ဘာေႀကာင္.ကြ်န္ေတာ.ကုိအဲဒီတံုးကမတားခဲ.တာလည္းဆုိတာမသိပါဘူး ” လုိ.
ကုိႀကက္ေတာကဆုိပါတယ္...( အခုကုိပဲအဲဒီရဲေတြက ေအေက ၄၇ မကုိင္ပါဘူး၊ အမ္ ၁၆ ကုိင္ပါတယ္
ဆုိၿပီးၿငင္းခ်င္တဲ.သူကရွိေသး...)

”အခုကြ်န္ေတာ္ေၿပာတာေတြကိုေတာ.သတိထားၿပီးေၿပာရပါမယ္..နုိ.မုိ.ဆုိၿမန္မာၿပည္ကလူေတြကုိ
ဒုကၡေရာက္သြားနုိင္ပါတယ္...လူေတြကေတာ.ကြ်န္ေတာ္.ကုိ စီအုိင္ေအကလႊတ္တာ...စစ္အစိုးရ
ရဲ.စီမံခ်က္အတုိင္းေရာက္လာတာစသည္ၿဖင္.ေၿပာႀကပါတယ္...ဒါေပမယ္.အဲဒါေတြတစ္ခုမွမဟုတ္
ရပါဘူး ” လုိ.သူကေၿပာဆုိခဲ.ပါတယ္...

အရင္တစ္ေခါက္သူလာခဲ.တံုးကလဲလံုၿခံဳေရးစစ္သားေတြသူေရကူးၿပီးၿပန္အထြက္မွာေတြ.ၿပီးဖမ္းဆီး
စစ္ေဆးခဲ.ပါေသးတယ္တဲ.   .....သူကငါးၿမွားယင္းေရကန္ထဲၿပဳတ္က်တာပါလုိ.ရႊီးခဲ.တာကုိယံုၿပီးသူ.
ကုိမဖမ္းခဲ.ပါဘူးလုိ.သူ.မိသားစုကုိေၿပာၿပခဲ.ပါတယ္...

အခုတစ္ႀကိမ္သူေရထဲဆင္းလာေတာ.လည္းအေစာင္.ေတြကရယ္ေမာေနာက္ေၿပာင္ၿပီးသူ.ကုိ
ေက်ာက္ခဲေတြနဲ.ပစ္ေပါက္ခဲ.တယ္လုိ.ဆုိပါတယ္...တရားခြင္မွာလည္းတရားသူႀကီးကုိမယံုယင္
အဲဒီအေစာင္.ေတြကုိေခၚေမးနုိင္ပါတယ္လုိ.ထြက္ဆုိအစစ္ခံခဲတယ္လုိ.သူကဆုိပါတယ္....
အဲဒီေရကူးၿပီးအ၀င္တံုးကသူ.ကုိမတားဆီး၊မဖမ္းခ်ဴပ္ခဲ.တာကအေစာင္.ေတြဟာသက္သက္မဲ.
အပ်င္းႀကီးတာလားဒါမွမဟုတ္ဒီေရကန္ထဲကုိဘယ္သူမွဆင္းၿပီးေရကူးၿပီးမသြားရဲႀကဘူးဆုိၿပီး
တထစ္က်တြက္ဆထားတာေႀကာင္.လဲၿဖစ္နုိင္ပါတယ္လုိ.ေၿပာပါတယ္...ဒါမွမဟုတ္သူတုိ.ဟာလူ
ေတြကုိသိပ္ေႀကာက္ေအာင္ၿပဳမူထားလုိ.ဘယ္သူမွအခုလုိသတၱိရွိရွိလုပ္လိမ္.မယ္လုိ.မထင္ထား
တာလဲၿဖစ္နုိင္ပါတယ္လုိ.ဆုိပါတယ္...

ႀကက္ေတာတစ္ေယာက္အခုလုိေရကူးၿပီးသြားဖုိ.စိတ္ကူးဘယ္လုိရတယ္ဆုိတာမေၿပာၿပေပမယ္.
အမည္မေဖာ္လုိတဲ.ေနာက္နုိင္ငံသံတမန္တစ္ဦးကေတာ.ေထာက္လွမ္းေရးအစီအရင္ခံခ်က္္ေတြ
အရႀကက္ေတာတစ္ေယာက္ေရမကူးခင္ရက္သတၱပတ္အလုိေလာက္မွာအန္အယ္ဒီအဖြဲ.၀င္အ
ေယာင္ေဆာင္ထားတဲ.လူႏွစ္ေယာက္မဲေဆာက္မွာအဲဒီအခ်ိန္တံုးကေရာက္ေနတဲ.ႀကက္ေတာဆီ
လာေတြ.ၿပီး သူမ အေနနဲ.သူ.ကုိလက္ခံေတြ.ဆံုနုိင္ပါတယ္လုိ.လာေၿပာပါတယ္...(အဆုိပါကိစၥကုိ
သေဘာထားမွတ္ခ်က္ေပးဖုိ.အစုိးရကၿငင္းဆန္ခဲ.ပါတယ္...)

ႀကက္ေတာကသူႏွင္. သူမ ဘာေတြေတြ.ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးတယ္ဆုိတာေၿပာဆုိဖုိ.ၿငင္းဆန္ခဲ.ပါတယ္...
ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးဆုိင္ရာကုိယ္ပုိင္ေဆြးေႏြးခ်က္ေတြမုိ.သူ.ရဲ.ဇနီး၊သားသမိီး မိသားစုကုိေတာင္မေၿပာၿပနုိင္
ပါဘူးတဲ.   ....( အင္း ...အဲဒါကိုေတာင္ ခနဲ.မယ္.သူ ေတြရွိနုိင္ေသးတယ္...)
သူမ အခုလုိထပ္မံခ်ဴပ္ေႏွာင္ခံရတာကုိေတာ.သူ.အေနနဲ.အလြန္ပဲေႀကကြဲ၀မ္းနည္းရပါတယ္တဲ.  ...
သူ.ေႀကာင္.ဒီလုိၿဖစ္ရတာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး...သူ.အေနနဲ.ဒီလုိအခ်ဴပ္အေႏွာင္ခံရေစဖုိ.မၿပဳလုပ္ခဲ.ပါဘူး
လုို.လဲသူကေၿပာပါတယ္...
အခုေတာ.သူဟာအေမရိကားကုိၿပန္လာတဲ.ေလယာဥ္စားရိတ္ကုိလည္းေပးရမွာၿဖစ္ၿပီးသူ.က်န္းမာ
ေရးအတြက္ေစာင္.ေရွာက္ဖုိ.ထည္.ေပးလုိက္တဲ.နာ.စ္ အတြက္ကုန္က်စားရိတ္ကုိလည္းသူကပဲေပး
ေဆာင္ရမွာၿဖစ္တယ္လုိ.ဆုိပါတယ္....
သူ.မိန္းမကေတာ.ႏွဳတ္သီးေကာင္းရွာပါး သူ.ေယာက်ာၤးေႀကာင္.ပဲကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ.နုိင္ငံကိုကမ ၻာက
ပုိသိသြားပါေသးသတဲ.ဗ်ာ...

အင္းဘာေတြၿဖစ္လာနုိင္သလဲဆုိတာေတာ.ေစာင္.ႀကည္.ယံုမွ တစ္ပါး ....





ေဟာဒီမွာနယူးစ္၀ိဂ်ာနယ္ကမူရင္းသတင္းေလးပါ...

How was a retired bus driver from Missouri able to make a flipper-clad, two-kilometer swim to the heavily guarded house of Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, one of the world's most famous dissidents? While John Yettaw languished in Burmese jail during his trial for "illegal swimming," all we could do is speculate. But now, in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK, Yettaw has offered an explanation:
Burmese security officials let him. "I don't know why they didn't stop me," he says. "The man with the AK-47 shook my hand and let me in."

In his first full-length interview, conducted by telephone from his home in central Missouri, Yettaw addressed the rationale for his undiplomatic dip, responding to critics and speaking at length about his commitment to Burma. "I want to free Myanmar. I want to stop the suffering there. I am antijunta. I will never be at peace, emotionally or psychologically, until that woman is free, until that nation is free," he said.
Late Thursday night, the 53-year-old Missourian remained an enigmatic figure, failing to clarify lingering questions and offering rambling and occasionally contradictory responses. "I have to be careful what I say or it will hurt the people of Myanmar," he explained, using Burma's other name. Echoing his court testimony, he says he traveled to Burma hoping to visit the Nobelist Suu Kyi—and to warn her that he'd learned, in a divine vision, terrorists were planning to assassinate her. He denied that the military junta ruling the country had put him up to the visit. "I've been accused of being CIA, of being on the books of the junta. The idea is just ridiculous," he said.

Still, the question remains: why didn't guards stop Yettaw as he made his way across the lake to the home of the country's most famous prisoner? Yettaw had made a similar aquatic bid for the Suu Kyi house in November 2008, but he was turned away by her on-site companions. He told family that he had been captured by guards at gunpoint on his way back from her house. The guards, he says, apparently unaware of his first attempted visit to Suu Kyi's house, bought his story that he had fallen into the lake while fishing and let him go.

It's not clear why authorities took a harder line this time, putting Yettaw on trial and ultimately sentencing him to jail. He says he doesn't know, but indicates that authorities did not seem too concerned about stopping him: instead, a group of guards languidly threw rocks at him as he paddled along. "I told [the judge at trial], Haul them in here and ask them for yourself." He added: "Maybe they were just lazy, or untrained or so cocky that they didn't think anyone would try to swim by them," Yettaw said. "Maybe they are so used to people being scared that they didn't expect anyone to do something so courageous."

Yettaw declined to say where he initially got the idea to visit Suu Kyi by crossing the lake. But according to one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, intelligence reports show that senior Burmese officials were told to come up with a way to keep the Lady incarcerated, as her May 27 release date loomed. Around a week before Yettaw's second swim, this person says, two men posing as members of the reform-minded National League for Democracy allegedly approached Yettaw in Mae Sot, an untidy border town in Thailand, and told him that the Lady was ready to receive him. (The Burmese government did not respond to requests for comment.)

Yettaw won't say what he and Suu Kyi discussed once he made it to her house. "It is so personal that I have no right to discuss our conversation with anyone, not with my wife and not with my children," he said, adding that he is "brokenhearted" that she is under house arrest once more. Still, he doesn't see his actions as the cause of her predicament. "I didn't put her there. I didn't imprison that woman."

Actually, he says, his visit may have even saved Suu Kyi from the terrorists he believes were out to get her. He is not a hero, though: "I don't like titles. You can call me John." He bristles at the suggestion that he is unstable and possibly mentally ill, as some people, including one of his three ex-wives, has suggested. "I am not crazy. I am not insane. I am not bipolar."
Since touching down in Springfield, Mo., on Wednesday, Yettaw has kept a low profile—ducking out of an airport side door without picking up his luggage in order to avoid the waiting scrum of reporters and photographers. "I was really worried that he would be different or changed," Yettaw's 21-year-old daughter Carley, says. "But he wasn't. It was just like seeing my dad regular. It wasn't a big deal." His wife Betty has also downplayed the homecoming, focusing instead on the financial burden of her husband's long trip. Although Webb helped secure his release, Yettaw had to pay his own travel expenses and foot the bill for a nurse assigned to monitor his health. "They are breaking us," says Betty, who is also keen to deflect criticism of John. "Yeah, [Suu Kyi is] back under house arrest, but people who didn't know where the heck Burma was, who couldn't find it on the map for all their life, now know."